1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network reliability. More particularly, the present invention relates to the recovery of lost data packets over a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the proliferation of connections to the internet by a rapidly growing number of consumers, traffic on the internet has increased correspondingly. As a result, network congestion and the loss of data packets at the network level are serious problems.
While higher level protocols such as TCP/IP can guarantee packet arrival in an otherwise low reliability network, reliability is generally accomplished at the cost of increased overhead resulting from additional handshaking and retransmissions. Hence, efficiency is sacrificed for increased reliability.
There are several conventional schemes for increasing network level reliability. One conventional scheme for recovering of lost/corrupted data packets is striping. Striping involved the generation and transmission of parity information for a block of data packets having equal packet lengths. Accordingly, striping is not suitable for data packets having unequal packet lengths.
Another conventional scheme for error recovery of corrupted data packets is packet-level parity in which parity information of each data packet is embedded within and transmitted with the respective data packets. However, in the case of a catastrophic loss, e.g., a loss of the entire packet, embedded parity information is not helpful because the parity information was transmitted with the data packet, and presumed to have suffered the same fate, e.g., lost, as the data portion of the data packet.
In view of the foregoing, there are desired improved techniques for efficient recovery of lost/corrupted packets having different packet lengths transmitted over a computer network which efficiently utilizes the network resources.